It’s
not the tool it’s the context
How does technology influence the many ways that we organize our lives?
clocks | textile machinery | drill order | iron making | synergy
Concepts in Technology, 1550-1750: pp. 92-108.
Three Industrial Movements, 1700-1815: pp. 108-130.Gender roles in technical changes 1600-2000
Concepts in Technology, 1550-1750:
1. Developments in printing (movable type), clocks, steam these all are keystone tools in a larger mechanical complex.
2. Blocked technical systems? a failure of diffusion to cross borders or sectors.
3. Concepts of Organization: how many people and what tasks do each perform?
4. Factories & Plantations: the replacement of agrarian by mechanical survival tools.
5. Factory Machines: a new form of organization is required, 100 workers in Hubei, China, for example:""Over a longer period, culminating around 1650, new equipment was introduced into the Chinese textile industry to cope with an increased use of cotton. . . . machines were adapted to serve different purposes."
"In one region where this activity was concentrated the number of people employed. . .grew from 7,000 around 1700, to 11,000 in 1730."
"In these respects, China's technical system was clearly not 'blocked.' Invention and expansion were continuing, and responded effectively to pressures arising from resources scarcity (Which encouraged innovation) and a growing labour force (which limited the use of some labour-saving machines)."
pp. 94-95
“One western innovation whose adoption in other cultures has attracted specific comment from historians is the weight driven clock."
One symptom of this difference in interests is attitudes to clocks.
- In the West they were seen as of great significance in showing complex motions of the planets reduced to a model with simple parts. . . . Seen as a symbol, the clock represented the growing belief that a form of mechanical order permeated the universe."
- In both civilization (Chinese and Islamic) there were important developments in mathematics at the same time, notably trigonometry and algebra in the Islamic world."
Transfers of technology: silk spinning and weaving in China and in Britain
Derby silk mill, 1702.
“As with most transfers of technology, the transfer of Italian silk machines to England stimulated local innovations, so once again we find that the ingenuity expressed in machines from one culture evoked a response elsewhere, as in a dialogue.”
p. 106.
“problems with work discipline and organization.”p. 107.
"It's not the machine, its the motion."
“Much has been made of the impact of textile machinery inventions in the eighteenth century, but it will be apparent that up to the 1760s the machines actually used in the textile industry – like cane crushing mills mentioned earlier on Caribbean sugar plantations – were of a very traditional kind with centuries of history behind them.What was really new was the approach to work discipline and organization, which had parallels on plantations also, and in contemporary armies.”
p. 107.
Evidence
Maurice of Nassau, and the Netherlands' War of Independence from Spain,
"Lippershey presented his spy-glass to Count Maurice of Nassau, who immediately ordered three more and ordered him to keep his methods secret. He saw is as a useful spying weapon in war and the picture shows the telescope being used in war."
Funeral Procession of Prince Maurice at Grote Markt in Delft, 1625.
In 1618 he succeeded his elder brother, Philip William, as prince of Orange. Throughout his career the Netherlands continued to struggle for independence from Spain. In 1590 he took the offensive against the Spanish under Alessandro Farnese. His campaigns were primarily distinguished by his skill in siegecraft. His successes on land and on sea enabled the Netherlands to conclude (1609) a 12-year truce with the Spanish (then commanded by Spinola). The truce virtually established the independence of the seven United Provinces.
Summary
"Arms drill, division of labor and the design of industrial machines, all required a similar approach, therefore, consisting of the analysis of complex motions made by arms, hands and fingers into many simpler component motions."
p, 99.
Three Industrial Movements: 1700-1815:
1 Coal, iron ore smelting & the steam engine: Newcomen’s engine & mine drainage
2 Asian competitive stimulus in textiles: water driven looms: spinning & weaving of thread
3 Trade in textiles and East Indian shipbuilding
deindustrializationPacey's Themes: convergence, dialogue, foreign commerce
Key concepts that predate these changes are:
- observant inspection
- adaptation
- measurement
- craft knowledge of machinery
- precision instruments
- sequencing
- standardization
- survival versus fine technology
- exaptation
- reorganizing of labor
- keystone technical inventions
- tool complexes: animals, water, wind, fire, etc.
Stages in development of technological compexity:
""it may be right to envisage 'blockages' which could limit the development of technology, . . . because with many techniques there is a limit to the improvements which can be made by craftworkers' methods. For example, dye made of madder plants grown in calcium rich soils."
"This kind of blockage could occur in metalworking or the design of machines, and the way round it usually depended on on analyzing the process more clearly so as to conceptualize what was involved."
Measurement and scale drawing as a contribution "Filippo Brunelleschi, just before 1420." He was the architect whose dome on Florence's Cathedral rested on old knowledge of materials applied to meet new expressions of architecture that demanded novel solutions to spanning and enclosing vast spatial distances.
p. 95.
"While a new pattern of organization was emerging, the techniques, used were often old ones, sometimes transferred from other countries."
p. 103.
- Resource shortages in timber, water, fuel wood.
- Resource shortages in Britain lasted until the 1820s.
- 1500-1750 population doubled in China, India, and Europe.
- shortages affected production and fuel switching.
- coal turned into coke in 1709, by A. Darby of Shropshire.
- Newcomen's engine of 1712 to drain coal mines.
- 1718 a cast iron cylinder was crafted in Coalbrookdale for steam engines.
- 1734 100 Newcomen engines in mines around Britain.
- steam engines improved by Smeaton in 17were versatile, attached to blast furnaces.
A Second Industrial Revolution
Shropshire
"more than just a shift from wood based fuels to coal( and coke) from timber construction to iron , and from water wheels to steam power."
"There was also a second industrial movement,...Related to the ideas about organization of production....'new forms of work discipline' were enforced by iron masters and magistrates and were encouraged by evangelical religion."
p. 116.
textile industry represented by cotton spinning, dyeing, calico printing (cloth)
much more concerned with factory organization
"India was a creative influence of some significance for British technology. One aspect of this influence was the low cost and high quality of Indian cloth. Labor (in India was plentiful...."
p. 120.
Third industrial movement, located in India.p. 121.
India’s muslin & Arabic fabrics (Damask) and ship construction were superior in quality and durability to England’s products in the 1700s, But by the 1800s Britain had regulated itself a competitive advantage by banning imports from India to favor domestic textiles and limited East Indian ships in British ports. The consequence was to stifle manufacturing and capital accumulation in India.
British dominated India after 1783 led to a stifling of East Indian technology
"As it was, such developments were delayed until the 1850s and later when the first mechanized cotton mill opened. Investors were the same Parsi families who invested in the shipping trade of the 18th century."
Fourth industrial movement in the extended family, is overlooked, but radically important to understand the full context of Pacey's argument
The creation of a work force depended on large numbers of children in a completed family, the extended family among peasants, workers and crafts people was the widespread and prevailing norm from 1500s to the 1800s.
The creation of the "nuclear family" as an upper class ideal that permeated the middle and working classes by 1890.
How may technical change have affected gender definitions of work?
 |
 |
|
|---|---|---|
| Tools of Toil: what to read. | ||
| Tools are historical building blocks of technology. | ||
Pacey on social meanings of tools
Technology, Conclusions about | Pacey, in World Civ. | Pacey, Meaning | Pursell | Kranzberg | periods
Related concepts: historical relations of tools and society, defining technology, significant events in history
